Op donderdag 20 maart 2025 is de Breda University of Applied Sciences gasthogeschool van het jaarlijkse Trendcongres Toerisme en Vrijetijd 2025. Het thema van het congres is Toerisme in Transformatie: Business as Unusual. De congresorganisatie maakt vandaag de drie internationale keynotes bekend: Dr. Willy Legrand, Stanislav Ivanov en Ramon Vullings.

We zijn verheugd aan te kondigen dat alle artikelen van de nieuwste editie van Uncover, het jaarlijkse, thematische tijdschrift van de Academy for Leisure & Events van de Breda University, nu online beschikbaar zijn in de kennisbank van NRIT.

These are dynamic times, characterised by widely differing opinions about and movements around internationalisation. Creating a themed Uncover issue at this time could be seen as choosing the right moment to take a breath of fresh air amidst the storm. With the current turbulence, taking stock of where we actually are, where we have come from and where we are going is a meaningful process. For BUas and ALE, it is clear that internationalisation has been in their very fibres from the beginning and that the added value of intercultural classroom settings is something to be nurtured sustainably.

Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas) is proud to house one of the six World Leisure Centers of Excellence. BUas has arranged its education activities in five academies. The World Leisure Center of Excellence is part of Academy for Leisure & Events (ALE).

The World Leisure Organization (WLO) has two Centers of Excellence (WLCE) in Canada, each with distinct settings and dynamics: one in Nanaimo, British Columbia, on Canada’s west coast, and the other in Trois-Rivières, Québec, in Eastern Canada. A key difference between the two centers is their language. The WLCE at Vancouver Island University attracts students from English-speaking Canada and global regions, including India, Iran, China, Mexico, and Vietnam. The WLCE at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières offers the only French-speaking graduate leisure studies programs and thus attracts local and international students from Francophile regions. This linguistic distinction significantly influences their respective international partnerships.

The Department of Tourism at the University of Otago has been a World Leisure Center of Excellence since 2018. Known also by the M?ori title of ?t?kou Whakaihu Waka, the University is located in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. Dunedin is renowned for its diverse natural landscapes, unique wildlife species and multicultural heritage. It is possible to construct an image of this WLCE as being a long way from everywhere else, disconnected from the rest of the world and out of touch. Certainly, the recent experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which New Zealand’s borders were closed for a long period and life within them went on pretty much as before while so much of the rest of the world struggled. Yet seen from a different perspective, New Zealand is one of the first places in the world where the new day dawns. As such, it may be said to lead the world, not merely follow in everyone else’s shadow.

Under the background of building a moderately prosperous society in all aspects, the income level and quality of life of China's residents have significantly improved, while leisure and recreation have become an important part of the Chinese people's daily lives. For example, the survey in the Annual Report on Leisure Development in China 2023-2024 shows that 86.2 per cent of respondents consider leisure time to be very important or important to them, which is an increase of 22 percentage points from 2022 (China Tourism Academy, 2024). Therefore, to meet people's needs for a better life, leisure has become a national strategy and an important way to promote social harmony, stability and improve the quality of life. In addition, with the increasing integration and advancement of emerging technologies such as 5G, big data, cloud computing, and AI in the leisure industry, the ongoing emergence of innovative business models in the leisure sector, the continuous enhancement of policies and institutional frameworks in the leisure field, and the notable improvement in governance capabilities, a diverse pattern of high-quality development in the leisure industry has been established. This development is further supported by the cultural, tourism, sports, and health sectors. As a result, leisure activities in China have evolved from traditional, often passive, activities to diversified, more active, technology-driven activities, and on a global scale (Lin & Dong, 2018). We would like to give a brief overview of the main issues and challenges of the current globalisation of leisure activities in China.

The School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, at the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP), is one of the founding hubs of the World Leisure Centers of Excellence (WLCE) network. With 4,400 students and over 250 professors, EACH-USP is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary (2005-2025), but it is part of one of the most influential universities in Latin America: USP was founded in 1934 and, today, is ranked at position 85 at QS World University Ranking. The creation of the new campus brought innovative and, in some cases, unprecedented focuses to the undergrad environment, including marketing, public policies management, textile & fashion and, of course, leisure and tourism programmes. Though tourism is a traditional academic pathway in Brazil (the first undergraduate programme opened in 1974), EACH was a pioneer in combining leisure and tourism topics into a single programme, enhancing an integrated approach to both fields.

An entire chapter from the World Leisure Organization (WLO) has been contributed to this edition of Uncover. This first article introduces the World Leisure Organization including the phenomenon of World Leisure Centers of Excellence (WLCEs). This is followed by articles from WLCEs from Brazil, Canada, China and New Zealand. BUas, which is a WLCE too, finally concludes the chapter including a look into the future at the World Leisure Congress in 2025, which will take place in the Netherlands in Breda and Rotterdam.